This invention relates to a toilet flush water colorizer which comprises a container adapted for receiving therein a flush water-coloring block and having at least one entry opening for admitting flush water thereinto, and outlet means for the discharge of colored flush water from the container.
Toilet flush water colorizers of the above-described type are known, for instance, from British Pat. No. 1,057,865 to J. Goddard & Sons Limited, wherein a recipient containing an erodable coloring block, i.e. a block which is slowly dissolved and/or disintegrated from the outside inwardly by the flush water, is placed or hung into the cistern for the flush water of a toilet.
The coloring block contains as primary ingredient a soluble coloring material such as a dyestuff or pigment, a blue coloring of the flush water in the toilet bowl being preferred. Of course, such blocks or sticks are also known to contain disinfectants or deodorants, as well as cleaning agents. When, after actuation of the flushing device of the toilet, repeatedly over a prolonged period of time, e.g. for a month or more, the flush water leaves the cistern uncolored, this will indicate that the coloring block has been consumed, its coloring agent being exhausted. Replacement of the exhausted block by a new one requires that the user can take off the lid of the cistern, put in the new block and then fasten the lid back in place. However, increasingly, such cisterns are being manufactured of thermoplastic resin material and after mounting the discharge valve means therein the lid is fastened on the cistern by means of glueing or thermic welding, thus making replacement impossible.
As the effectiveness of active ingredients, in particular of deodorants, of such blocks which have been discharged from the block into the flush water in a toilet cistern is only very weak and hence unsatisfactory, blocks or sticks containing such ingredients have for some time been suspended in a small slotted container, e.g. a small elongated basket, at the inner sidewall of a toilet bowl, as has been described in French Pat. No. 1,602,063 to Madison Chemical Corporation (see also U.S. patent application Ser. No. 693,488 filed on Dec. 26, 1967 by Seymour Leavitt, in particular FIG. 3).
However, if a toilet bowl cleansing block of this type would contain a coloring agent such as a blue dyestuff, besides the deodorant, disinfectant and cleansing agents now conventionally present therein, in order to color the flush water in the toilet bowl, e.g. a blue color, at each flushing of the toilet, then this would have the drawback, confirmed by the applicant in numerous tests, that after each flushing, when the flow of flush water has subsided, there is still an "after-dripping" of the block, i.e., drops of flush water continue for a prolonged period of time, depending on the erodibility of the block, in fact often for five to ten hours or more, to flow down the sidewall of the toilet bowl. The concentration of colorant in these drops increases with time, thus producing on the sidewall a stripe of color, e.g. of blue, which extends from the block container downwardly causing an unclean, unesthetic aspect of the bowl. This stripe is the more difficult to remove, the longer the "after-dripping" has lasted.